The Auburn Lake Trails plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
4.75 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1905. The next wettest, 4.70 inches, fell in 2017.
Auburn Lake Trails’s center stands about 1,680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 1,930 ft, a difference of 1,260 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 4,580 ft, 15 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jurassic marine rocks, unit 1 (Western Sierra Nevada and Western Klamath Mountains) (slate, graywacke), from the Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Auburn Lake Trails reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Black Rock Creek, the South Fork American and the Sacramento: about 110 river miles.
Lake on the way: Folsom Lake.
55 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Auburn Lake Trails; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Auburn Lake Trails has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Auburn Lake Trails normally reaches 62° and falls to 41°. The record high is 82°, in 1906; the record low 20°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 2.68 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Colfax, 14 miles north, 690 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.